


A Day at the Cabin

by mercutiglo



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Mythology - Freeform, Original Statement, Puzzles, The Kraken - Freeform, magnus archives creations challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 07:48:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19970527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercutiglo/pseuds/mercutiglo
Summary: Statement #00257943 Statement of Caroline Sanderson, regarding what was definitely not a fish in the lake her family’s cabin resides on.





	A Day at the Cabin

Statement #00257943 Statement of Caroline Sanderson, regarding what was definitely not a fish in the lake her family’s cabin resides on. 

Statement begins: 

It was hot. It was mid July, 95 degrees in the shade, and even those with nice air conditioning were suffering because the power was going out all over the city because everyone had their own air conditioning blasting. So we went to the one place that would provide the relief from the heat without any electricity - the lake. We had driven up to the cabin the weekend before since we knew that the heat was coming, but everyone else did the same and the small town nearby certainly did not have as robust of a power grid as necessary for such heat. 

The lake our cabin is on is a small one, called Turtle Lake. Not as many cabins as on the nearby lakes, but that means there’s less people to deal with. My grandparents were the ones who owned the cabin, but if they weren’t there then they never really minded if my parents brought me and my siblings so long as we didn’t wreck the place. The neighbors weren’t up that weekend, so at the very least we had our little part of the lake to ourselves.

It turned out that there was no one else on our lake that had come up. My sister and I were 15 and 17 respectively, and we had friends that should have been up there, and when we went around to each of the different cabins, each one was filled with darkness and stale air, void of life or friends our age to hang out with. My sister Kathy was a bit more adventurous than I was, and was just fine with wandering off into the woods for hours on end by herself, no matter how much it worried our parents. I preferred to stay closer to the house, helping my mother out in the kitchen if she’d let me or digging through the old movies and books my grandparents kept in the cabin if she kicked me out of the kitchen. Occasionally I put a puzzle together if I found one, but they were almost always missing pieces. 

The puzzle I found that week at the cabin was one I hadn’t seen before, but that didn’t phase me because my grandparents traded puzzles with their neighbors all the time, since apparently all old people do is watch movies and put together puzzles. I had done trains, color grids, little cabins on lakes, the night sky, wolves, tigers, and plenty of other typical puzzles, but this one was different. As I put it together I could tell it was an aerial view of a lake surrounded by trees and a smattering of cabins - just like any lake in the area. I looked at the box to see if it said where the photo was taken, but the box it came in was plain, not even a picture, which had made things extra difficult. My parents were over at someone’s house - someone who lived in the town that they had grown up with - while my sister wandered the woods, so I was alone in the house while I struggled through the puzzle. 

The thing about puzzles is that sometimes you start to notice details that weren’t immediately apparent on the picture on the box. And so of course when you don’t have a picture on the box at all, you have to make sure that you pay attention to every little tiny detail. And despite how hot it was, I couldn’t have the fan running because - even if it had worked - there was a chance it could ruin my entire puzzle, so I was sweating quite a lot the entire time. I had promised Kathy that I would wait to go swimming with her until she got back from her excursion into the woods, so I couldn’t even take a dip in the lake to cool off. 

I noticed one cabin in particular that was starting to come together - typical grey roof, leafy green siding, a wooden deck that led out to the lakeshore, overall a normal looking cabin. But I noticed that there was a bird feeder on the deck that had been painted with bright pink flowers, just like the one on the neighbors deck. And the car in the driveway was the same small orange car the neighbors drove. But surely it had to be a coincidence, right? There were some interesting patterns in the water that didn’t make sense either, so it probably was just that - a coincidence. 

Until I got a little bit to the left and noticed another cabin. Reddish-orange siding with a black roof, and a wooden patio with a firepit and grill that were still gathered together after the night before’s dinner. The detail was so fine I could see the half-drunk cup of coffee still sitting on the glass topped table next to a copy of “The Great Gatsby” with a library barcode visible in the corner. I stared at that piece for a while before I stood up and went to the sliding door to the patio. The chairs still gathered around, my summer reading book next to the cup of coffee I didn’t finish because of my mother calling me in to have actual breakfast. There was no way that the puzzle could show this. I grabbed the book and the coffee and brought them inside, pouring out the rest of the coffee since it had been sitting outside for hours, and putting the book on the counter.

When I returned to the table with my puzzle pieces, I picked up the piece that showed the patio outside and scoured it for the book and coffee I had just removed, but they were nowhere to be seen. 

I decided that there was nothing there, it had been a trick of the mind, I was just hot and my eyes were making things up, and just continued with the puzzle, placing the piece with our cabin on it next to the neighbors cabin, right where it belonged. 

I made it through the rest of the puzzle without really paying too close of attention anymore, the mind-numbing task of sorting through a thousand puzzle pieces to find the one that I needed simply becoming a process as my mind began to crumble in the heat. At some point I determined I needed some water and got up and got a glass from the kitchen. I noticed that the overall temperature seemed to have dropped, the sky darkening with a storm. I opened the window in the kitchen and pretended to have the commanding, echoing voice of my mother. “Kathy! Kathy! There’s a storm coming! Get back here!” My voice didn’t echo. In fact, as I listened for her to scream something back at me about how I was worrying too much, I heard absolutely nothing. 

I always mock the people in horror movies who just go about their lives when there’s something clearly wrong, but in that moment the only thing I could convince myself to do was to go back to my puzzle. I didn’t know where my sister was, I didn’t know when my parents were coming home, and I didn’t understand this puzzle that I was putting together. But just the act of putting it together was enough to keep me calm enough until someone else got home. 

I don’t know how long exactly I spent putting the puzzle together, but it felt like I went through it super fast and excruciatingly slow at the same time. As I was getting closer to the middle of the lake, I began to notice some of the pieces of the water were… Off. It almost looked as though there had been another puzzle printed underneath this one of the lake, but I picked at one of the pieces and only found one layer of color on the top of it. I brought one up to my face, inspecting it closely, and realized that it looked like there was something just under the surface, something curved and twisting, but I couldn’t figure it out from just one piece. That was when I realized the puzzle was completed except for that piece in my hand. The water in the lake was dark, a reflection of the darkness of the storm rolling in, but that image under the waves clearer now that it was put together.

What lingered under the surface was something that seemed only possible in a story, a gigantic mass of suckered tentacles intertwined underneath the surface, meeting in the middle of the lake at what looked to be some sort of head of some sort. When I noticed the piece in my hand, I realized that there was a small boat on it now, that Old Man Soren who went out fishing every single day no matter what the weather was like. Part of me wanted to keep the piece out of the rest of the puzzle, keep him safe and contained from what was waiting underneath him, but I knew that I had to finish the puzzle, no matter what happened. 

The shaking started the second I put the last piece into place, the ground and the cabin and the table and everything moving around. There weren’t earthquakes here, we were too far inland, so it ruled out that possibility, but I still looked around and got to a doorway, like I had heard about in books and movies, just in case the cabin was collapsing down around me. I stood in that doorway and watched, transfixed with a mixture of horror and fascination, curiosity getting the better of me as the tentacles on the puzzle in front of me began moving around, writhing, pulling themselves out of the dark water as ripples erupted around them, masking the motion that the rain was making against the water’s surface. The arms of the creature shot up into the sky, far above the treetops, and had I been closer I would have jumped back as they seemed to touch the top of the puzzle, pushing upwards on it, trying to break free.

But when that proved impossible, they plummeted back down towards the water, and Old Man Soren’s boat was nowhere to be seen when the water settled.

At some point I had crouched in my hiding spot, the shaking having settled by this point, and when I got up the courage to look at the puzzle yet again, any trace of whatever it was that lived in the lake was gone, just leaving the clear blue waters of a sunny day, although the boat was still missing. 

As I was looking over the waters, a speck of color moving around in the corner caught my eye, something small and bright red moving through the trees - Kathy. She must’ve heard my yelling earlier, or felt the small and impossible earthquake that I appeared to have caused. I didn’t want to try and answer questions about the puzzle I had put together, so I quickly swept it back into the box it came in.

As I did so, there was a film on top of the table, something slimy, like you might feel on the outside of a fish. 

Or the end of a large octopus’ tentacle.

I made the decision not to go swimming with Kathy after she burst back into the house, despite her loud accusations of things like “you promised!” and “why?! It’s so hot!” I made sure to keep a close eye on the waters though.

I don’t know if I ever went swimming after that. Not even much of a fan of baths. Showers get the job done much better, and there are no pools of water that can change at any moment’s notice.

Statement Ends.

**Author's Note:**

> This was super duper fun!!!! Thank you SO much to the organizer of this because giving? Each person? Their own prompt? Amazing. I hope to be able to do more of these in the future if there are more of them!
> 
> In case it didn't come across, I was given "The Sea/Water" and I decided to take this in more of a Kraken direction, although I based the cabin itself/the lake it's on off of the cabin my grandparents owned when I was little (Yes, it was actually on a lake called Turtle Lake) so I mean, authentic fear? Jonny Sims be proud of me thanks.
> 
> As always, kudos/comment/subscribe for more content (i've got more of the "jonny sims' season 2 reject ideas" series coming at some point, i'm busy with many things including my own podcast and writing a fic for a zine and 900 various wips so i promise they're coming the next one is a beach episode and after this one yall can understand if i need a moment away from the beach fears in the middle of summer)


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